Christmas messages from Fry and Sayle

JVL Introduction

We post below Stephen Fry’s address to the Nation on antisemitism (in case you haven’t watched it) together with David Rosenberg’s tweeted reaction to it. Many of us share David’s bewilderment where he was “left wondering what it was an alternative to, and what a missed opportunity it was”.

It really is a messed-up message, and David’s critique spot on.

That is followed by Alexei Sayle’s Alternative, Alternative Christmas message.

Another Jew not afraid to assert his Jewishness, Alexei gently knocks down the pomposity of “elderly Jewish comedians” (no-one is mentioned by name) and to the one who says we should “stand with the Jewish people” Alexei says fair enough.

He explains why he is doing just that, standing with the Jewish Bloc, with whom he has marched on all the pro-Palestine demonstrations. There “instead of looking to Israel to make Jews safe we look instead to solidarity, freedom, justice and equality for Jews and Palestinians everywhere.”

RK

So I watched Stephen Fry’s “Alternative” Xmas broadcast yesterday hoping for some enlightenment, but was left wondering what it was an alternative to, and what a missed opportunity it was.

A Christmas message focusing on rising racism against a range of communities, in a year when leading politicians have ratcheted up rhetoric against refugees and extended that to attacks on multiculturalism would have been a welcome alternative.

As would a message that gave a sense of the parallel rises in antisemitism and Islamophobia, here, much of it with reference to, or exploiting the asymmetric “war” taking place in Palestine, and the asymmetric reporting of it.

There was nothing alternative about locating the horrific events of October 7 as the catalyst to everything that followed, as if life in Gaza under siege, or the West Bank on October 6 was hunky-dory. As if Israel’s Nation State Law of 2018, which enshrined apartheid there had not occurred, or the elevation of self-declared fascists into Israel’s cabinet shortly after Israel’s 2022 election, which gave the green light for a further escalation of settler violence against Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Territories including pogroms, and a series of provocations at the Al Aqsa mosque had not occurred.

Fry was just echoing the deliberately myopic right wing perspectives that dominate the mainstream media and are faithfully put out too by a clique of uncritical bodies that declare themselves as leaders of what is clearly a fracturing and conflicted Jewish community that includes growing numbers of Jews speaking out against a genocide that we see being enacted.

It would have been an alternative to examine those voices, here in Britain, across generations, among Jews who condemn all racism and seek a future of peace, justice and coexistence in Israel, that are challenging those mainstream narratives. Fry could have been bold enough to echo those Israelis who lost immediate family on 7 October in the Hamas attack, but have spoken publicly against their Government’s indiscriminate response driven by revenge and retribution on a civilian population.

Fry played safe on those issues, clinging so closely to Establishment narratives. And did a massive disservice to the anti-racist movement endorsing a hierarchy of anti-racism by setting victims of racism in competition with each other.

His specious claim that antisemitism was the “one acceptable face of racism” in the UK today would have astonished those at the sharpest end among Gypsy, Roma, Traveller communities, Muslim communities, Black communities who continue to face state and institutional racism, as well as many Jews active in challenging all these, and alarmed at rising antisemitism.

Fry has been conspicuous by his absence from campaigning movements against racism in Britain, but that is hardly an excuse.